diskwatch 0.6.1

Single-host, read-only disk diagnostics TUI. Eight tabs across devices, volumes, filesystems, IO, SMART, hot files, and insights. Sibling to netwatch and syswatch.
diskwatch-0.6.1 is not a library.

Inspect disk activity, capacity, health and busy files. DiskWatch brings devices, volumes, filesystems and IO into one terminal, with anomaly cards to help investigate problems. It is read-only and needs no configuration to get started.

Install

brew install diskwatch                # macOS / Linux
nix-shell -p diskwatch                # NixOS / Nix
paru -S diskwatch                     # Arch (AUR)
cargo install diskwatch               # build from source with Rust
x eget use matthart1983/diskwatch     # prebuilt release binary

Prebuilt binaries are available for macOS and Linux (x86_64 and aarch64), including static Linux builds, plus Linux armv5te and Windows x86_64. Build from source.

Install smartmontools for full SMART attribute tables. Without it, SMART reporting is limited to the basic health flag where available. On Linux smartctl needs root to read a drive, so run sudo diskwatch for SMART data; otherwise the SMART columns say "needs root".

Run

diskwatch                       # eight tabs
diskwatch --lite                # one 80×24 screen
diskwatch --dense               # six panels on one screen
diskwatch --watch ~/src         # watch a specific tree instead of the defaults
diskwatch --diag                # print collected state and exit

1–8 switch tabs, V cycles views, , opens settings, ? shows help, q quits. Every keybinding · All options

The tabs

Key Tab Shows
1 Overview Device summary, aggregate IO and capacity
2 Devices Model, firmware, serial, usage and device details
3 Volumes APFS containers, Linux mdraid state and resync progress, ZFS pools and vdevs
4 FS Mounts, capacity and usage thresholds
5 IO Per-device throughput, history and sampled latency
6 SMART Drive health and available NVMe/ATA attributes
7 Hot Files Paths ranked by event rate, with inferred process attribution
8 Insights Capacity, health, wear, temperature and activity anomalies

Full-view demo. Available measurements vary by platform and permissions.

Views

View Size For
Full Tabbed Exploring individual devices and subsystems
Lite (--lite) 80×24 Throughput, capacity and busy files in an SSH session or tmux split
Dense (--dense) Full layout at 104×32 or larger IO, devices, latency, volumes, SMART and files together

Dense uses a compact layout in smaller terminals. / filters files in Lite and Dense; s cycles file sorting in Dense. View details.

Measurement limits

Hot Files infers the busiest process holding a path open; it does not identify the writer of each event. Sampling can miss short-lived writers, and unprivileged attribution is limited to your user.

Latency percentiles and histograms use sampled interval averages, not individual IO timings. macOS does not expose the device busy-time counter used for Linux utilisation. Unsupported measurements display --. Capability matrix.

Docs
Reference Views, controls, installation and CLI options
Configuration Themes, columns, refresh settings and config precedence
Watch paths Watch roots, defaults and Linux inotify limits
Process attribution How Hot Files associates paths with processes
Capabilities Platform support and measurement limits

Related

NetWatch covers network diagnostics; SysWatch covers system activity. They share the terminal layout and palette.

Thanks

Community packagers maintain the Nix and Arch packages. Repology tracks package versions. File packaging issues with the packagers and DiskWatch bugs here.

License

MIT